Wednesday, March 16, 2016

It's Not That Complicated: Chapter 7- Part One

This chapter crystallizes a market-share problem that the Botkin Family hasn't quite solved yet. The number of people who are willing and able to buy a Christian Patriarchy book is a set, limited market. To get the best returns on the investment in the book, the Botkins need to attract as many sub-divisions of the Christian Patriarchy, Quiverfull and Christian Homeschooling groups as possible. The Botkin Sisters' first book "So Much More" was published in 2005 through Vision Forum Ministries. That was a great marketing choice since the Botkin Sisters book would not have gotten much traction without sponsorship of a major industry player in CP/QF/HS. At some point after 2005, the Botkins Family spun off from Vision Forum Ministries and started their own site at Western Conservatory which published "It's Not That Complicated" in 2011.

Where's all this going?

Well, the Botkin Sisters have to cast as wide a net as possible which leads to the confusion in this chapter. They create an overarching theme that rejects Emotional Purity as taught in "I Kissed Dating Goodbye" by Josh Harris (which Josh Harris also rejected, interestingly) while interspersing paragraphs that support Emotional Purity. This chapter allows them to sweep in both the pro-emotional purity and anti-emotional purity crowds.

*gasp* I just realized that emotional purity could be shortened into "Emo-Pur"! YES!

Overarching Themes

Emotional Purity is a false construct because human hearts are grievously sinful to start with.

This section starts with a paragraph that drags in all the disgusting female purity demonstrations that CP love to share. I'm not typing that.]

Perhaps the biggest problem with these analogies is that they rest on the presumption that the heart is naturally chaste, whole, clean, and in the right place to begin with. Most of us have a perception of the female heart as a perfect, glowing white orb, radiant with the light of its own untainted purity until outside forces begin to break in to corrupt, pillage, steal, and vandalize. It starts outs fresh, new, virgin, cellophane-wrapped, but gets dirty and broken when it comes face to face with the realities of life. But this time, it's (not that) simple." (pg. 114-115)

As a child of the '80s, I can promise you I had NO perception of what the female heart looked like in either the pure or not pure form. At my Catholic school, there was a semi-annual "why you shouldn't have sex before you married" talk, but that focused on a) teenage pregnancy and STD prevention and b) that God doesn't want people to have sex before marriage. There was never any implication that having sex prior to marriage would cause you to have permanent damage to your "heart".

I tend to be overly concrete in my thinking, but what do the Botkins/Emo-Pur crowd mean by heart? They can't be describing the actual heart. Do they mean soul? Mind? Emotions? A subset of romantic feelings? I really dislike the term "heart" being used here.

"The heart is no inert, passive, clean slate, an empty page for men to write on. It does not require men to taint its purity. From day one, our hearts start busily writing their own stories (which are fully capable of being R-rated). They're not still, quiet waters - they gush profusely. They're not serene fields - they're factories, furiously generating their own feelings, intents, and desires.

'Truely,' said John Calvin, "the human heart is an idol factory." These little engines are very active, inventing evil, deceiving, murdering, blaspheming, running away from God, and committing adultery continually. We often refer to our hearts as the injured parties, suffering violence from charmers, heartbreakers and insensitive clunks. But this heart is no victim. It's a perpetrator . (pg. 115)

I think we've jumped out of the frying pan into the fire here. So instead of having some happy little glow worm of happiness purity in our chests, we now have a boiling pit of deceit.

The other problem I have the "all human hearts are evil" mantra is that it doesn't really hold on a large scale. If God is the only thing keeping each of us from murdering and committing adultery, then Christians should never murder or commit adultery. Likewise, figuring out which religion is right could be easily solved by tallying the total crime rate committed by believers.

I was taught the "humans are complicated" mantra of God-human interactions. I believe infants are born sin-free, but with the basic selfishness of all humans. As we grow, we get better at both being good and being evil. The tricky bit is working at becoming better at being good while avoiding evil.

"However, there are stronger forces than us that work in our hearts. One is sin. The other is grace." (pg. 116)

This chunk confused the hell out of me. Not that sin and grace are at work in people; I can conceptualize that. No, I'm still stuck on what this "heart" is.... A combination of our mind, emotions and soul might work.

"We ask the wrong question when we ask "Is having a crush a sin?" The Bible doesn't actually say, and the reason is because "emotional purity" is a made-up moral category. (...) There are plenty of real moral categories for real sins - like lust, covetousness, idolatry, fear of man, vain imaginations, and presumptuous sins. How much clearer would things be if we could just go ahead and say, "I've made an idol out of a young man; is that wrong?" or "I'm having lustful thoughts for this guy - is that a sin?" (pg. 117)

I agree with the first two sentences of this paragraph. The Abrahamic religions made it 2,000 years without obsessing over emotional purity; we are not doing any favors by adding a new sin to the list.

I agree with parts of the next sentence: there are real moral categories and sins. The list after the dash gets shaky - sins have traditionally been defined as actions taken toward self, towards others or towards God. Out of that list, exactly one - idolatry - has been classified as a sin. Lust, covetousness (which I'm classing as a synonym of envy) and fear are feelings; feelings that can lead to sins, but not actual sins. I've got nothing for "vain imaginings". I don't know what a "presumptuous" sin is, but it feels redundant on a list of sins.

I suspect my threshold for deciding that I've made an idol out of someone or am thinking lustfully is much higher than the Botkin Sisters are.

Up to this point, the story is coherent; the problem is that the following paragraphs are intermixed in the chapter making the overall story much more muddled.

Emotional Purity is the best thing ever!

"We're very grateful for the groundwork that has been laid by the Emotional Purity advocates, people who first began to seriously address the problem of handing out bits of our hearts with reckless abandon. We, for two, needed to hear about the concept of guarding our hearts, keeping our emotions under control, and being faithful to our future husbands in thoughts and deeds." (pg. 116).

The Botkin Sisters had JUST finished the "our hearts are evil factories!" spiel. This makes the image of people handing out chunks of their soul, mind, hearts seem....dark. "Here, take my inner evil!" *evil cackle*

Notice how confusing this passage becomes when you hit the "emotional purity is a made-up category" on the facing page.

This chapter really needed an outside editor.

"The Bible gives plenty of clear commands, both positive and negative: Guard your heart. Love the brethren from a pure heart. Think of what is pure and what is true. Don't covet. Don't lust. Have self-control. Take every thought captive. Going against any of these clear commands is a sin. This should answer our questions." (pg. 117)

Notice the conspicuous lack of actual Bible quotes for this passage.

Of these, there are pretty good quotes for "Love brethren; don't covet; don't lust; have self-control."

I can think of a few that mean "Think of what is pure and true", but not doing that isn't implied to be a sin.

"One thing that can help us understand the concept of purity and fidelity is the concept of covenant. Two people who are in covenant together have certain privileges and obligations which are off-limits to all the people not on the inside that covenant. Christ's Church must be pure because she belongs to one Husband, and on the day when she is joined with Him, she must be able to present herself untarnished, unblemished, and saved exclusively for Him. And this is our duty to our own husbands. In the meantime, our hearts, our minds, our bodies, and our loyalty are not available for those who haven't purchased them with a commitment. "(pg 119).

This paragraph could form an entire blog post of crazy-rebuttals.

Problem #1: That's not what a covenant means.

Both contracts and covenants can be used to deliminate privileges and obligations. The difference is that once one party in a contract breaks the contract, all other parties are free of obligations in the contract. A lease is a standard example of a contract. A tenant agrees to pay rent in exchange for living in an apartment. If the tenant doesn't pay rent, the landlord is not required to let them live in the apartment because the contract is broken. A covenant is an agreement that is binding on all parties regardless of the actions of the parties within the agreement. In Genesis 9, God makes a covenant with mankind where mankind will reproduce, will not eat blood and will not murder while God will not flood the entire Earth again. Because that's a covenant, God doesn't get to flood the Earth the first time someone eats blood pudding. (And I'm grateful for that....)

Problem #2: The Botkin Sisters quoted Ephesians 5:26-27 on page 119 and still managed to get the analogy completely backwards!

The Church cannot present herself untarnished, unblemished and saved exclusively for Christ because the Church is made up of humans. Only after the cleansing brought by Jesus will the Church be without sin again. That's Ephesians 5:26-27. I don't know what the Botkin Sisters were reading instead.

Problem #3: Covenants and contracts are not retroactive.

The Botkin Sisters have not made a marriage covenant or contract with anyone and therefore do not have any duty to their future husbands.

Yes, I know that Proverbs 31:12 states that a good wife will do a husband good all the days of her life. The verse is written in present tense and ends with "all the days of her life". The most logical conclusion is that she does him good in the present and will do so in the future - not that she was obligated to do him good before she knew him.

At the end, we have a chapter that can appeal to the Emo-Pur folks and be used by the anti-Emo-Pur folks as well. Unfortunately, the net outcome is a confusing mass of contradictions.

Added bonus: I don't know if this text (FB post? IM?) was included except as a slam against public schooling or against writing skills in general:

"As one girl wrote to us: 'My friend + i hav both decided that wee r neva goin 2 d8 + we want our 1st kiss 2 b on our weddings...[but] i was tellin sum of my friends @ school about the decisions ive made and another question came up, is it wrong to have a crush on a guy? my friend says that you can't control whether u have a crush on sum1 or not and im not 100% sure how 2 answer that. Can u guys help?" (pg. 116)

2 comments:

I can give you an almost 100% guarantee they made up that text at the end. I can't imagine them having any friends who would a) text them a question like this -- nobody they know well enough to give their phone number to would have this question b) actually talk with friends at school about whether it's wrong to have a crush. It's just too fabricated feeling.

Yeah, it felt forced to me. I am FB friends with some former students who use a lot of texting shorthands on their posts. You don't shorthand "sum" "we r neva" and "2 b" then write out decisions and questions.